How to quickly identify sepsis-causing bacteria – melt it down

When a patient is diagnosed with sepsis, a medical syndrome that kills more people than breast cancer, prostate cancer and HIV combined, it sets off a countdown for doctors to treat the infection and uncover the culprit causing the body’s systems to shut down. However, identifying the exact pathogen causing the infection can take days with current procedures, which is time a terminally ill patient simply does not have. But hope could be on the horizon, as researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) recently unveiled a diagnostic tool that enables blood-borne bacteria to be identified in a matter of hours.